


i always feared / i would be ophelia

by insatiablegaydesire



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Coming Out, Eddie Kaspbrak Lives, First Kiss, Fix-It, Fluff and Angst, Gay Eddie Kaspbrak, Gay Richie Tozier, Getting Together, M/M, Stanley Uris Lives, please check notes at the beginning for content warnings, reddie-centric but hints to bike and benverly with established stanpat, turtle magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-01
Updated: 2020-07-01
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:08:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25013701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/insatiablegaydesire/pseuds/insatiablegaydesire
Summary: “Things aren’t always what they seem to be; people aren’t either. We all have secrets we’re keeping from each other. I know we do, because I have plenty of my own to name. So we tell each other our deepest secrets, we reshape how we view each other, change our very identities, and then we’ll be able to change anything It has touched. Including each other.” Bill looked forlornly at Eddie, gripping his shaking hand in his own. “We can fix this, I know we can.”And because Bill was the one who said it, everyone believed it.The seven Losers hide out in a cave that Pennywise can't reach, searching for a solution to keep Eddie alive. Bill is the one who finds it.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 26
Kudos: 168





	i always feared / i would be ophelia

**Author's Note:**

> well! i finally brought myself to watch chapter two a couple days ago and immediately had to write a fix-it fic right after, so this is that. enjoy, darlings. <3
> 
> title is a set of lyrics from [We're All Flightless by Shark Puppy](https://soundcloud.com/lauren-does-music-things/were-all-flightless), a fanmade IT band whose songs you can listen to right now! (psst, i also write lyrics for some of the songs so it would really mean a lot to me if you checked the link out!)
> 
> Content Warnings for: suicide mention, sexual abuse mention, emotional abuse mention
> 
> you can talk to me on my [tumblr](https://sapphicsansastark.tumblr.com) or [twitter](https://twitter.com/unibrowrichie)

The six of them tumbled into the crack in the wall, placing themselves past Pennywise’s reach and down to where Eddie lay groaning, bloodied hands clutching the air above his chest but never quite coming down close enough to touch the wound. The fear of dirty blood was too strong, even stronger than the studied instinct to apply pressure to the gaping hole above his heart. He was amazed it had even missed his heart, the beat of it pulsing in the thin skin around his ears. Everything was loud, everything was screaming, and everything was on fire. The cave was a house burning down and he was its only occupant. Or at least he was, until the other six decided to follow him into the destruction.

“Shit. Shit, shit, shit!” Richie rushed over to Eddie, straight into the fire. He kneeled beside him and pushed his jacket to Eddie’s bleeding chest, following through on the instinct for him. He could feel the cold, hardened mud caking into the spot where his clothed knees met the ground, but the only thing that mattered right now was Eddie staying alive. “What the fuck do we do?”

“There’s nothing we can do,” Stan said, using both hands to push the sweat-soaked curls off of his dirtied forehead in exasperation. “There’s no way we can get him to a hospital in that condition, with It still out there.”

“What the fuck do you mean, we have to do something!” Richie yelled. The shake of his voice was exaggerated in the echo of the phrase off the empty walls, bouncing off of rock and skin and reasserting itself upon their weakened ears.

“Well I’m not going to lie to you! We can’t do anything!” Stan yelled back. Their voices laid on top of each other when they reverberated, two strung-out men toppling on the verge of a cliff and heard by those already down below.

Mike and Ben attempted to calm down the pair, open hands and open arms reaching out to reassure, but Richie and Stan shrugged out of their holds. On the side, Bev brushed the hair out of Eddie’s eyes from where it had fallen onto his forehead, hand laid over Richie’s on the hoodie pressed to Eddie’s chest. Bill hung back, alone, silent and thinking.

“Guys,” Bill muttered. “Guys!”

All six turned to face him, as they always had whenever he called. The only voices that remained were the echoes of the past.

“I have an idea.”

Bill walked toward Eddie, squatting down next to Richie. He laid a hand on Richie’s shoulder, but this time Richie accepted the touch. “You remember when we were younger? In the house, when we were facing the three doors, but we had to get to Eddie. Do you remember how we got past them?”

Richie squinted, looking away from the state of Eddie’s torso to concentrate on picking up the tail of the forgotten memory. The answer was on his tongue before it was in his mind, the full memory hitting him all at once when he heard it in the soft repetition of the responding echo. “You told me they weren’t real.”

“And you believed it. It went away because we didn’t believe it.”

“That’s how It works,” Mike said. “How It controls us. It feeds on our fear, but only if we believe in It.”

“Exactly,” Bill said.

“So, what?” Stan asked, crossing his arms over his chest. “You want us to believe that Eddie’s just magically going to get better? I wish that was how it worked, but it isn’t, and it never will be.”

“C’mon, Stan, give it a chance. Please.” Bill, for the first time, looked one mistake away from giving up. The shadows in his face were deeper, the light in his eyes wavering in the frigid air. The others dreaded to think how they would react if their allegorical leader abandoned them amongst these gleaming stalagmites and bones.

Stan softened under that stare, slumping and averting his own gaze to the ground. “Fine, but you’ll have to offer up a more compelling argument. My logic is hard to beat. Patty always jokes that that’s the one thing she wishes she could change about me.”

The lighthearted comment did more for the group than they thought, bringing a smile to all of their faces in the dark of the grim moment. Bill began his explanation here, when the hope was the brightest and their minds the clearest.

“Things aren’t always what they seem to be; people aren’t either. We all have secrets we’re keeping from each other. I know we do, because I have plenty of my own to name. So we tell each other our deepest secrets, we reshape how we view each other, change our very identities, and then we’ll be able to change anything It has touched. Including each other.” Bill looked forlornly at Eddie, gripping his shaking hand in his own. “We can fix this, I know we can.”

And because Bill was the one who said it, everyone believed it.

“I’ll start,” Bill continued, looking them all in the eye and making sure they listened. Their attention was important in order for this to work. “You might all know this already, but it’s taken a long time for me to admit it to myself.” 

He took a deep breath in, looked away from them as he let it out. “I blame myself for what happened to Georgie. That I couldn’t save him. I was his big brother, I was always supposed to be there for him, and I let him go out there, in the rain, alone. What kind of big brother does that?”

“You were just a kid,” Bev said, her voice scratched to threads.

“Yeah, how could you think that?” Mike sat down on the ground next to Bill, pulling him into his side. “You didn’t kill Georgie, and you didn’t lead him there. That’s all on It.”

“I know that now.” Bill’s lips quirked to the side, mind lost in a memory. “So that’s my secret.”

For a moment they all sat in silence, waiting for someone else to pick up the thread and tug them along. The closest to Bill, and the closest to understanding just exactly how this magic worked, Mike took the next step of the journey on himself.

“During those twenty seven years stuck here, I was constantly convinced I was going mad. That It didn’t exist, or that you guys didn’t either. Whenever I started doubting myself, I’d go to the box underneath my bed and pull out my old yearbooks, flipping to your faces just so I could prove to myself that you were real. But then I’d start questioning if I ever even talked to you, that maybe I knew your faces and names from around town and imagined that summer. So I’d bring out the box again and pull out the birdbook Stan gave me for my fourteenth birthday, the drawing of a turtle Bill did for art class, the mixtape Richie made for me because he couldn’t stand my own collection of music. And even after all that, some days I’d lie in bed wondering if I made those mementos for myself. It was only a few years ago I unearthed an old envelope of photos of the seven of us. But even then I couldn’t fully trust my own eyes. Seeing you all at the restaurant... that was the first time my doubts entirely washed away.”

“I can’t imagine staying here all those years, all alone” Ben said, shaking his head. “Anyone would’ve gone a little crazy.”

“The important thing is that we’re here now,” Bev said. She reached across Eddie’s chest to lay her hand on Mike’s shirt, letting him feel her presence as the warm reality it was. “We’re here and we’re real and we’re telling you, you’re  _ not _ mad. You’re the sanest of us all.”

“Or at least saner than Richie,” Stan offered from where he remained standing on the side.

“Hey!” Richie’s false offense melted when held next to the flame of Eddie’s weak laughter from below him. “Okay, okay, you know what? That’s actually kinda true. I finally got diagnosed with ADHD when I was twenty-three, so.”

Mike joined Eddie in laughing, tucking his head down close to his chest. “Thanks, guys.”

“My mom had me when she was fifteen,” Ben said suddenly, the laughter dying down and replacing with shocked silence. “I never brought you guys home when we were younger because I didn’t want anyone to know. My father was a nameless older man she met in a bar, one she didn’t even have to show ID to get into. I think the reason I was so ashamed of it was because she held that same shame in herself. It’s why we moved to Derry. She wanted to escape her family and I wanted to escape the jokes about my mom being a decade younger than all the others. I wanted a new start.”

“New Kid,” Bev muttered to herself.

“Is your mom still alive?” Stan asked. Some of them had already experienced that loss, and felt the empathetic pang in their hearts to imagine Ben going through the same, except with an even younger mother.

“Yeah,” Ben said, and a sigh of relief was released among the group as one. “Though she lives in Texas now.”

“I’d love to finally meet her,” Stan replied. “She must be a wonderful person, to have raised a man as kind as you.”

Ben smiled, and for a second, it was like sunshine flooded through the entire cistern, chasing out the deep, damp dark. The walls shone with a silver glint like the moon, but the warmth was entirely of the sun.

“My father was an evil man,” Bev said, and just like that, the dark flooded back in and the sun was pushed out once more. “He used to let himself into my bedroom at night, or during the early mornings on weekends. Never when the sun was out. Only before dawn arrived. I asked for a lock once, but of course he refused.”

“Bev, you don’t have to...” Ben trailed off, the words unsaid voiced in the resounding quiet.

“I do,” Bev insisted. “I have to say it. For Eddie, and for myself.”

The others waited patiently, kindly, as they always would, even if she didn’t speak for another twenty seven years. They’d wait here for as long as she needed them to, still as statues, knowing deep down what came next but not having the right to speak it themselves. Because that was what being a Loser meant: never leaving the others behind. They’d already done it once before, unintentionally abandoning the memories of each others’ existence as soon as their bodies left the confines of this town. That was not going to happen again. 

“He sexually abused me,” Bev finally said. The words were expected, but they hit hard all the same. The punch to the chest passed around them all, Eddie letting out an audible, pain-ridden wheeze. He waved away the helping hands of Richie and Mike, regaining his breath all on his own.

“Bev..” Bill said, searching for the words, the forgotten ending to a sentence he never knew he’d have to speak. “I had no idea.”

“None of us did,” Mike said.

Bev whispered when she spoke again, the fear in her statement ringing true. “I’ve never told anyone before. I was always so afraid that no one would believe me.”

“We believe you, Bev,” Ben said, bleeding heart dripping onto his sleeve.

“Yeah,” Richie said. “That guy was a real asshole. If he wasn’t already dead I’d suggest we kill him ourselves.”

“Thanks, guys.” Bev offered a weak smile, wiping away the tears forming in her eyes. “You were the ones who believed me, back with the blood in the bathroom. I should’ve known I could tell you.”

“I have a secret,” Stan said. He didn’t wait long before letting the penny drop. “I thought about killing myself after I got that call. Set up the bath, the razors, everything.”

“Holy shit, Stan.” Richie, who had been constantly checking back on Eddie throughout this entire conversation, now couldn’t tear his gaze away from Stan, watching every tremor in his body as it happened.

“I was so close. Held them to my skin until the bathwater grew cold, until my wife, Patty, knocked on the door and asked if I’d prefer a hotel or a rental house for our vacation in Argentina. I thought of how she didn’t deserve this. And then I thought of you guys, of how this would hit you too, finding out right after you thought you had me back again. But mostly, I thought about how much I wanted to see you. Of how I wanted to kiss my wife, and come back home to her after this was all said and done. And if I had pushed down, I wouldn’t have any chance of going back through that front door ever again. At least this way, I had that chance.”

“Believe me, you weren’t the only one who thought about it,” Eddie choked out.

They all turned to him, stunned for the second time in a row.

“I never really thought about how I would do it,” he admitted. “But when that cab hit me during Mike’s call, for a second, I was thankful. I thought then that at least I wouldn’t have to come back home.” No one knew whether he meant Derry or his own wife, not even Eddie himself. “For the record, I’m glad neither of us went through with it.”

“Well I sure am fucking glad of it too,” Richie said, interrupting the two. “What the fuck, guys? I fucking love you. Fuck.”

“Yeah well, you might have to let me go after all,” Eddie joked weakly. The front of his shirt was now drenched in blood all the way down to the hem, cloth sticking to his skin around his wound. They didn’t have much time left, and they all knew it.

“Not if we have anything to do with it. Richie?” Bill said, and all eyes were on him. For once, Richie wished he could disappear from the spotlight, drifting back into the shadows of the cave. “You’re the last one up, buddy.”

“Can I take a pass?” he asked, his own attempt of mockery angering even himself.

“Richie.” Mike frowned, the lines on his face gained from the years left alone deepening into thick curves. “We need to do this, all of us. For Eddie.”

“For Eddie,” Richie repeated, mostly to himself than to the others. “Right.”

He wiped the sweat off of his palms on his blood-stained jeans, smiled awkwardly through the silence. “I need you guys to promise me something, though.”

“What is it?” Bev asked. Next to her, Ben leaned in sympathetically, the others following on subconscious instinct.

“That you won’t hate me for it,” Richie finished.

“I could never hate you for anything,” Stan said.

Richie choked out a laugh, but he was already beginning to cry, trailing tears visible behind his glasses. “Well that’s a surprise.”

Stan scoffed, wrapping his arms tightly around Richie’s frame and pulling him in close. “C’mon, you know our jokes were just jokes. I always loved you, man, you know that.”

“Rich,” Eddie spoke up, then, surprising them all. “It’s like you said to me before, right? You’re braver than you think.”

“You’re the one who picked up the bat,” Ben said.

“And the one who used it,” Bev said.

“And the one who refused to leave me behind.” Bill smiled, and Richie smiled back, albeit a little bit smaller.

“You can tell us anything,” Mike said.

“I’m gay.” Richie let out the words all in one breath, held in for four decades and craving the fresh surrounding of air. Richie’s body may have been large, but it was cramped, and it was all that statement had ever called a home. It craved the touch of others, the acknowledgement of a hand in another. Richie had never been kind to it, but maybe these new faces would be. “I always have been. I’ve pretended all my life that I’m not, even made a living off of it. But I always knew. So there’s my secret. I’m a liar and a fraud and I’m fucking weak for never having admitted to it.”

The silence continued around them, Richie continuing his uninterrupted stare-off with the ground.

“Well?” Richie asked. “Anything anyone wants to say?”

Eddie was the only one who found a voice within him to respond. “Rich... oh my God.”

“Okay, I get it, it’s surprising, but-” Richie looked up then, just in time to see Eddie’s wound closing itself up, skin meeting skin as if it had never been separated, drops of blood floating out of his shirt and into the air. “Oh my God.”

“It fucking worked!” Stan said, letting out a loud astonished bark of a laugh.

Richie couldn’t stop staring at the clean plane of skin visible through the tear in Eddie’s shirt, even the thin hairs on his chest repaired to full length. It was like It’s claw had never happened. “Damn, me being gay was really that unbelievable, huh?”

“No, it... it feels right,” Eddie said, sounding unsure as to why the words rang out true.

“What, like you knew?” The idea both terrified and comforted Richie at the same time. Being known was everything he’d ever wanted and everything he’d ever feared, especially when it came in the form of Eddie Kaspbrak’s eyes on him.

“No, I didn’t know. But it feels right.” Eddie and Richie shared a look between the two of them, an amalgamation of pure understanding and unadulterated hope.

“It does feel right,” Bev said, unaware of the moment that had just passed. “Like we’re sliding something in the universe back into place, something that’s been out of line for a long time. I don’t think I ever saw this in my dreams. I think this is the path where no one has to die.”

“The only people who had to die were the versions of ourselves we thought we were,” Mike whispered. 

“Damn, that’s deep,” Richie said, flicking his eyes back to the rest of them.

“So what do we do now?” Eddie asked, pushing himself off of the ground with a wince. Richie stood with him, hand still on his shoulder, letting Eddie lean himself on his side for support.

Richie smiled. “You know what they say: third time’s the charm. Let’s kill this fucking clown.”

***

The seven of them watched as the Neibolt house crumbled before them, so many years of darkness and rage dying amongst the collecting dust. It felt like an earthquake, a tornado, a flood without any water; it felt life-changing. They all watched as they themselves transformed right before a dying ember, stealing its fire for their own and rising anew, reborn.

“We... we did it.” Richie stared at the newfound heap of wood and concrete, breathless from the dust coating the outside of his clothes and the inside of his lungs. He turned away from the others, coughing harshly into the crook of his elbow. “Fuck, we did it, but I think I’m gonna lose a lung or two from the process.”

“You’ll be fine as long as there’s no asbestos,” Eddie said, then paled. “Fuck, wait, what if there’s asbestos?”

“There’s no asbestos,” Bill reassured him.

“I don’t know,” Stan said, making quick work of wiping the dirt off of his pants. “A house built before those laws were put into place, and abandoned prior to that too, there’s really no knowing.”

“Stan, there’s  _ no _ asbestos.”

And just like that, the tickle wreaking hell at the back of Richie’s throat disappeared.

“Dude, how the  _ fuck _ do you do that?” Richie said, spreading his arms out wide.

“Do what?” Bill asked, blinking rapidly from the polluted air.

“You just made my cough go away. You’re  _ magic _ .”

“It’s probably just a placebo,” Eddie said matter-of-factly. “You believe your cough went away, so the feeling did too.”

Richie made a noise, half-scoff, half-laugh. “Oh, so your open wound stitching itself together and the blood disappearing was placebo too?”

“In a way, it kind of was,” Mike pointed out.

“Fuck that,” Richie said.” It was magic. I know it when I see it, I mastered the art of pretending when I was ten.”

The memory of what had happened in the cave came back to them all, the adrenaline of It’s death leaving their systems immediately when they remembered what they each had to let go in order to get there. The secrets were a token of sorts, offered up to the fire of the Gods in hopes that they’d respond with a miracle. And what a miracle they had responded with.

“Speaking of that,” Eddie said. “I feel like I owe you guys a secret now too.”

“Eddie, you don’t have to do that,” Ben said.

“No, but I should. And I want to. But I actually have three.”

“Damn, Eds, you really just gonna show all of us up like that?” Richie said, slapping a hand to his newly healed side.

Eddie rolled his eyes, but the slight uptick of his lips betrayed him. The smile died down, though, when he continued on. “Okay, so. You probably all know this already, but just like Bill I was always too afraid to admit it. My mom abused me. She convinced me that I was weak, and delicate, and that I needed all that medicine to get better. She had this control over me that continued even after I moved out and became an adult. I was thirty five years old and rushing to her bedside every time she called because she said she needed me, or I needed her. It was only when she died that I finally got away.”

The six of them stood still and listened, refusing to interrupt Eddie in a moment in which he needed to be the only one heard.

“Second, I think my wife is abusing me too. I know what you’re thinking, especially you, Rich. I really did marry my mom, huh?”

“I married my dad,” Bev said, only interrupting so she could offer that one small bit of solidarity. “It’s not an uncommon thing to do, Eddie, especially for people like us.”

“People like us,” Eddie repeated. “I guess we really are more similar than I thought. Well, I did. I married a woman who treated me just like my mother did. She controlled me, and she belittled me, and she made me think that I was weak. She tried to stop me from coming here too. The moment I walked out of that door and left her behind was the moment I finally told her no.”

A wartorn look flashed across Bev’s eyes, the understanding between them meeting in the same lifeless look behind their gaze when they thought about the past.

“And third. I think I might be gay.”

“What?” Richie said, the word leaving his own mouth before the statement even fully left Eddie’s.

“I don’t know. I don’t really seem to be attracted to women, but it’s not like I’ve ever even kissed a man, so who’s to say.” Eddie paused, an idea forming behind the aged lines of his face. “Wait.”

Eddie grabbed Richie by the back of the neck and yanked him down, pressing their lips together with purpose. So many years of words left unsaid and things left undone, pent-up emotions and love unannounced, it all fueled itself into this kiss, leaving the pair breathless and amazed when they finally tore themselves apart.

“Yeah. Okay.” Eddie swallowed, face still centimeters away from Richie’s and feet unwilling to take a step back. “I’m definitely gay.”

Richie simply blinked, mouth still hanging slightly open from the kiss.

“Congrats on coming out, Eddie, but I think you might’ve broken Richie right there.” Stan smirked, elbowing Richie in the side and watching him sway from the force of it.

Bev laughed, then immediately clamped her hand over her mouth. “He looks like he did in the Deadlights,” she whispered through her fingers.

“Okay, fuck, uh, I can fix this.” Eddie patted Richie’s cheek, tugging at his hair a little. “C’mon, Rich. You’re fine. Come back to me.”

“What?” Richie widened his eyes, yanking his head back in surprise.

“You good?” Eddie asked softly, the undeniable caring note underlying his voice tugging gruffly at Richie’s tender heart.

“Yeah, I just. I think my teenage self is having a little moment right now. He’s very angry he didn’t get to kiss you first.”

Eddie laughed, half-patting, half-slapping Richie good-naturedly on the cheek again. “Tell you what, we can make up for all the lost time for the rest of our lives. Does that calm down your teenage self?”

“Did you just fucking propose?” Richie asked, startled fully back to reality.

“I mean, why not?” Eddie said, shrugging. “Shit’s already weird enough as it is. Life-ending injuries are fake. You’re gay.  _ I’m _ gay. Fuck it, I’m getting a divorce as soon as I get back to New York, so why not?”

Richie knocked a fist against the side of his own head. “I must be fucking dreaming.”

“You want me to pinch you?” Eddie joked.

“Can you pinch my ass?” Richie shifted his body slightly so that his back was on display, looking demurely over one shoulder, even throwing a quick wink in for good measure.

Eddie cackled, Richie brightening from the success of making him laugh. “God, I missed you.”

Richie turned back around, throwing an arm over the length of Eddie’s shoulder and pulling him in close. “You don’t even know the half of it, darling.”

The five of them watched as Richie and Eddie met once more in the middle, two lives that began intertwined tangling themselves up all over again, a knot that would never be undone. They stayed that way for an uncertain amount of time, not daring to separate the pair before they were ready to move forward, out of this moment. Bill and Mike drifted closer together, Ben and Bev already glued to each other’s sides. Stan simply stood, his hands in his pockets, and watched as a crow flew across the wreckage and into the dawning sky. A peaceful smile stretched itself across his features, a memory brightening behind the whites of his eyes. It couldn’t touch them anymore. It’s face only existed in their memories, something that would stay with them forever but serve as a reminder from whence they came.

Together, the seven of them left the ruins behind, sunrise framing their bodies and shining light upon the dirt they left in their tracks, walking down the road in search of a better future, one spent side by side, like what was always meant to be.

  
  



End file.
